4 purchases

I just came back from a visit to my beloved Buffalo. There is so much I want to do there, but since much of my family -- on both sides -- lives there, I  mostly spent a lot of time catching up.

Nothing wrong with that, but it limits the Buffalo things you can do.

I wanted to go back to the antique place I saw in a mall during my visit last year. There were a lot of cards there but I was caught off-guard.

Totally prepared this time, I was underwhelmed with this visit. There was hardly any vintage, way too much football and junk wax galore. Also, the following annoyed me:

A lot of the cards were under glass, so you'd have to find someone to ask to look at them. Particularly annoying is there were multiple dollar boxes under glass. Meanwhile, not far away, were comic books for a dollar each that I could touch and manhandle all I wanted. Come on sellers, stop it.

I walked out of there with nothing. I had planned to buy a couple '70s albums (so many great cheap ones) to go with my card purchases, but with the lack of card enthusiasm, it put a damper on everything and I just put the LPs back.

So then it was off to Dave & Adam's again. Surely I would find some cards there.

I left Dave & Adam's with 4 purchases. My wife bought two of them for me (she was still in birthday mode) and I bought two. She did much better. Let's see those two first.

 

For the second straight year, I bought a baseball T-shirt there. About 90 percent of their clothing inventory is football/Bills, so buying a baseball shirt there amuses me.

I've had Bisons shirts in the past, especially when I lived in Buffalo and went to games, but it's been a long time.

 

 

My wife also go me this. It's a panoramic view of the Bills' Highmark Stadium after a Bills touchdown last year. I looked it up and it's from the Bills' Sunday night game against the Packers last season.

Normally I would have no use for something like this that's like 40 inches wide, but they just gave me my own office at work!

I have never had an office before, even though I have been a boss for over 25 years. I still don't know what to do with it. It's decent-sized, has two windows and lots of wall space. So my wife is helping me with decor.

 

 

OK, now here are my purchases. Keep in mind I was rattled by the lack of interesting cards at the previous antique place and at Dave and Adam's. So much nonbaseball.

I needed some one-pocket pages. It's the only size I need, I have surplus of everything else. Do I need 100 one-pocket pages? Absolutely not. I need like 10-20. In fact I was in another store about 30 minutes earlier that had some hobby stuff, including some one-pocket pages, about a dozen tied together. But I decided not to buy them because I was going to Dave & Adam's. Upon seeing the 100 one-pocket pages -- the only option at D&A's -- I did not put them back and run racing back to the store with the more reasonable number of pages. I just bought the D&A overkill. I've become a terrible in-person shopper.

 

My second purchase. Yes, I have said I would not buy this. But I decided to because I was using birthday money and I had already bought plenty of Heritage, which was on display right next to Big League.

How bad could it be?

Answer: Very.

I don't like what they have done to Big League and now that I've seen it live, I really don't like it. It's being marketed as the replacement for Opening Day, a kid-friendly product. And the inserts are definitely kid-friendly.

But that doesn't make it cool to short-print a third of the base set. That's not kid-friendly. Five of the Dodgers cards are SP's. I don't know if I'll ever see them. And they're all foil. I don't want to see foil on my cards ever again and it's terribly mean to those with OCD to make some of the base cards regular card stock and some of them foil!

Yet when I expressed my opinion on this product on that other social media site, I got the usual apologists. "It's a fun, cheap rip." Well, "fun" is relative but this product is more expensive than Topps flagship. Anyone who defended Big League to me in response, I knew right away I had nothing more to say to them.

 

This is about the only card I enjoyed because I still needed it. I'm not showing anything else because I can't handle discussing it any more and I'll be getting rid ... er, distributing them to fellow trade partners.

 

But it's my fault. I should've bought more Heritage.

The best purchase of my visit though is when we went to John & Mary's, which is a sub institution in Buffalo. We walked in and absolutely everything inside it was the same as in the late 1980s. The booths in the same spot, same pictures on the wall. Nothing covered in shiny foil and no secret menus (i.e. short-printed food).

Just the greatest subs I have ever tasted anywhere. I feel sorry for the people where I currently live who think they know what a good sub is.

Kind of like people who didn't collect in the 20th century knowing what a good card set is.

Sorry, I think all the driving today made me old.